In Mascha Schilinski’s sophomore feature Sound of Falling, a German farmhouse plays host to the stories of several young girls and women across more than a century. Split between four distinct periods—World Wars I and II, the 1980s, and modern day—Schilinski’s ethereal drama travels elliptically through time, revealing a multi-generational saga steeped in trauma and secrets. It’s a film that portrays great anguish experienced in silence, all within the confines of femininity, through norms which have evolved over a hundred years, but which mirror each other in haunting ways.
SOUND OF FALLING ★★★★ (4/4 stars)
Directed by: Mascha Schilinski
Written by: Mascha Schilinski, Louise Peter
Starring: Hanna Heckt, Susanne Wuest, Lena Urzendowsky, Luise Heyer, Filip Schnack, Greta Krämer, Laeni Geisler, Luzia Oppermann, Claudia Geisler-Bading, Gode Benedix, Ninel Geiger
Running time: 149 mins.
Each segment is rooted in the perspective of one or two central characters—usually sisters, or mothers and daughters—but the connections from one timeline to the next are seldom clarified up front. Rather than laying out a linear plot, Sound of Falling jumps back and forth in time, as if caught in a stream-of-consciousness, but using recognizable sensory motifs as its temporal window. In the 1910s, adolescent Alma (Hanna Heckt) and her teenage sister Lia (Greta Krämer)—two of the family’s many children—gaze upon photographs of dead family members, both young and old. Their subsequent recollections of farmhouse funerals involve the sounds and images of buzzing flies, a recurring symbol of rot that yanks the movie through the decades.
In the 1940s, a young woman named Erika (Lea Drinda) becomes fascinated with her one-legged uncle Fritz (Martin Rother), to the point of stealing his crutches and hobbling around the farm, placing herself in the headspace of an amputee. In the 1980s, rebellious teen Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky) observes the quiet melancholy of her mother Irm (Claudia Geisler-Bading) while dealing with wandering gazes of her cousin Rainer (Florian Geißelmann) and his father Uwe (Konstantin Lindhorst). Finally, in the film’s contemporary setting, a new couple moves into the farmhouse, as their playful adolescent daughters, Nelly (Zoë Baier) and Lenka (Laeni Geiseler), befriend a grieving neighbor their age, the mysterious Kaya (Ninel Geiger).
On the surface, few of these plots feel directly connected, and the relationship between them is initially vague. Save for Fritz, who briefly appears in the 1910s as a younger man, no two characters seem to cross-pollinate between the timelines, leaving these women’s relationship to one another uncertain—if they’re related at all. However, it soon becomes clear that the logistical details don’t matter all that much, given the spiritual connections between the characters, and the way Schilinski binds them together through reverberating themes told with a deft artistic hand. Sound of Falling is a film of morbid fascinations, between the macabre family photographs in the 1910s—taken alongside dead family members propped up like puppets, a once-common practice—and the numerous scenes and impressionistic images of young girls submerged underwater, holding their breath, as if chasing death itself.
The film’s youngest characters all seem curious about dying—about what it feels like, and what comes after—though none of their older family members provide satisfying answers. Meanwhile, their teenage counterparts often imagine themselves in vivid, violent scenarios occasionally involving suicide and self-harm, wherein they embrace oblivion. This instinct to embrace absence permeates each story, whether as childlike curiosity, or as a response to depression and malaise. Several key characters are forced to contend with dark family secrets, and with other horrors presented with chilling matter-of-fact-ness, creating distinct echoes between each story.
Some of these echoes are subtle. They’re embodied purely by narrative developments, like the slow reveal of familiar cultures of silence—surrounding incestuous sexual impropriety—across the decades. Other connections, however, exist in an unspoken, ghostly aesthetic space. Schilinski and cinematographer Fabian Gamper often tether their roving camera to specific characters’ points of view, but they also introduce fleeting moments during which the frame has a spectral quality. The protagonists seem to acknowledge this, and make eye contact with the lens (accompanied by brief voiceover), as if in recognition of something invisible in the ether, connecting them to the other characters beyond time.
As the camera floats through space in these moments, the frame becomes blurry, as if zoomed in too tightly, and the film’s usually warm palette fades. It’s as though the camera were being wielded by—or perhaps, were embodying—family ghosts attempting to reach out through time and comfort their kin in their lowest, most vulnerable moments. Schilinski, sound mixer Claudio Demel, and sound editors Billie Mind and Jürgen Schulz even accompany these chilly visual flourishes with acoustic static, as if the boom mics on set had been turned up to maximum sensitivity in search of hints of the paranormal. It may not be a literal ghost story, but it takes full advantage of cinema’s inherent nature as a medium of ghosts—of the past preserved on tape and celluloid.
In the film’s most haunting and poignant moments, young, arguably naïve characters like Alma gaze upon the power of photographs to capture the dead and the living in similar hues, with the subjects of some family photos moving quickly enough to become blurs on a physical fabric. Similar moments re-occur in the 1980s, with the advent of Polaroid, as Schilinski self-reflexively zeroes in on the power of images to suggest a world beyond the physical (even if by accident), and to capture liminal moments, spaces, and emotional states of being. By focusing on characters who can seldom put words to their experiences—whether the ravages of war and trauma, the jealousies of adolescence, or the desire to simply no longer exist—Sound of Falling marvelously tells a century’s worth of women’s stories by weaving together the psychological, the physical, and even the spiritual, resulting in a dramatic tour de force of mind, body, and soul.
